Ghost in the Shell

by James Swallow

  Ouelet tried hard to keep hold of her temper. She and her team had succeeded in creating a new life form, and Cutter simply saw Mira as a tool for law enforcement. “Please, please don’t do that. You’re reducing a complex human to a machine.”

  “I don’t think of her as a machine.” Cutter’s voice was bland as he dismissed Ouelet’s concerns. “She’s a weapon. And the future of my company.”

  Cutter turned and left. Ouelet turned to look through the observation window at the examining room beyond. Mira was now sleeping peacefully.

  1

  SOLID STATE

  A year later, nothing and everything was new in New Port City. As its name suggested, the place was a major shipping destination, with a heavily trafficked harbor. It was also a hub of international industry, a magnet for worldwide corporate dealings.

  The night sky above was a dark cowl of heavy cloud, dense with unspent rain, looming over myriad steel and glass skyscrapers that reached toward it like the fingers of some giant machine.

  Due to the peculiarities of the city’s microclimate, it rained here often, but tonight the weather-modification technology kept the downpour in check. Traffic ran on multiple levels through downtown, with steel arches placed over each road at regular intervals both to hold up the infrastructure and to remind distracted drivers of the lane parameters. Green and red shimmering holographic signals pointed out on-ramps and off-ramps to the motorists. Packed in atop one another, the citizens ebbed and flowed through the avenues of the downtown core in pulses, mimicking the patterns of electrons through some vast circuit diagram. From high above, it was impossible to discern individual figures on the walkways or in the vehicles. There was only the flow of light and color, the constant motion. The city-as-machine, endlessly running.

  The sky, though, was full. Some things in it were simply for civic beautification, like the holograms of shimmering, glittering spheres that suggested New Port City was a place of glamour and joy. But most of the skyline was dedicated to commerce. Advertising was everywhere, on the sides of buildings and floating free in the air. Holograms, many of them towering higher than the city’s forest of skyscrapers, hawked everything imaginable, everywhere the eye could see, in every color of the spectrum. Solograms—holograms that appeared to be solid—proliferated as well. The audio for the ads was easily accessed on a variety of phone apps or cyber-augmented hearing channels within the ear, for those who were interested.

  One floating billboard crossed the sky, while a male announcer on the audio declared, “Introducing Bridgeworks from Lippastrift Technologies, the first artificially created memory enhancement…”

  The hologram competed for airspace and attention with many others. One simply advertised something called “Locus Slocus.” Another promoted “virtulearning” from Hanka Robotics. In another a female announcer promised, “Sirenum’s training protocol is the fastest and most efficient way to develop the abilities you’ve always wanted.”

  A fifth holographic billboard showed a man with a techno-enhanced hand. A male voice enthused, “Stronger than ever. Experience your power with PneumaGrip.” A sixth billboard had a contrasting style, as it was from law enforcement rather than a corporate sales division. Part of it read, in huge letters, “CYBER CRIME IS PUNISHED SEVERELY.” For those still unclear on the concept, the audio warned, “Cyber crime is a type-one offense. Minimum punishment: fifteen years in prison.”

  Hanka Robotics, arguably the world’s largest corporation, probably didn’t need to advertise itself. Then again, perhaps its prominence was due in part to its relentless self-promotion. It had yet another hologram commercial winding through New Port City airspace: “Protect your life essence, with virtulock technology. Hanka Robotics guarantees personal safety and integrity against outside threats.” With so many readily available bodily implants, this was a danger facing most ordinary consumers.

  More ads, some aggressive like the fifty-foot geisha advertising a nightclub, some subtler, like the zeppelin-sized solographic koi that swam between buildings, all clamored for attention in a variety of languages—English, Japanese, Cantonese, Arabic and more—as tuners in cars and radios and implants changed channels.

  On a restricted channel, heard only by the city’s law enforcement personnel, one voice came through unopposed. “All patrolling air units be advised. Possible cyber-crime activity in the vicinity. Airspace in all adjoining areas to be locked down. Section Nine is currently on site. Repeat: All patrolling air units be advised. Possible cyber-crime activity—” the voice faded a little, its wavelength compromised by the uncountable others, “—in the vicinity. All airspace…”

  With the enormous, vividly colored images moving everywhere, few people would even try to look through and past them to anything more solid. It would take both augmented optics and tactical knowledge to see a single figure, perched on a rooftop.

  The Major—this was how she thought of herself now; only Ouelet called her Mira—blinked. She stood near the edge of the towering building. Her visor was pushed up on her forehead as she looked down and across the street through the ocular implants that the rest of the world saw as lovely, but normal, green eyes. The edges of her long matte-black coat to flapped against her legs in the wind.

  Across the street from the Major, the Maciej Hotel was one of the city’s biggest towers, a jagged shard of reflective emerald and spun-lattice lunar steel that reached a dizzying one hundred floors high. Every level was an exercise in opulent luxury, with dozens of suites and bespoke rooms assembled atop each other to appeal to the richest men and women visiting the city, or even richer locals looking to impress someone.

  The Major looked down into the sheer drop between her position and the hotel opposite. The wind toyed with her, threatening to push her over the edge and into the gulf. She imagined the fall; the thought held no fear. The solograms briefly won her notice, each one claiming to offer the key to a better future through cybernetic improvement. The Major looked away from the advertisements and down at her gloved hands, pondering whether cybernetic enhancement, planned and voluntary, unlike her own, really did make people’s lives better. She saw herself reflected in the ideal identity the corporations were promoting. Her young face framed by short dark hair, with its deep eyes and old soul beneath. The body of an athlete all spare lines, lean and flawless. And within that shell—

  “This is Major. I’m on site.” She didn’t need to speak, or even subvocalize her response; the mindcomms link implanted in her neck gave her a kind of machine-telepathy that was routed directly back to Chief Aramaki at headquarters, and to the rest of her tactical team looped into the encrypted network. She could almost sense them out there in the darkness, faint phantom presences that existed just beyond the limits of her perception.

  “Awaiting instructions.”

  “Review and report.” The dour, resonant voice seemed to be conjured out of the air itself, perfectly clear despite the moaning winds across the Maciej’s rooftop.

  The chief’s words formed directly in the Major’s auditory nerve matrix, rendered silent and encrypted by one of the many neural modules beneath the surface of her skin. Even through the non-vocal link, the voice carried the same cadence as ever; every word precise, every sentence cut exactly to length. In all her time serving under Daisuke Aramaki’s command as a field operative for the Public Security Section Nine counter-terrorism unit, the Major had rarely heard the steely old man raise his voice. There had never been the need. She’d also never heard him speak anything other than Japanese, either aloud or through the comms. He did not require that others respond to him in Japanese, only that he be understood in his own words. This was not an issue for the Major. She couldn’t remember whether the language was something she already knew in her previous life or had been added to her linguistic skills as part of a cyber implant, but her Japanese was as flawless as her English.

  * * *

  Sixty floors below, a geisha bot in a floor-length red kimono, bound by a golden sa
sh, made her way down one of the many corridors of the luxury Maciej Hotel. The floor was lit from beneath, a pattern of white rectangles outlined in black. One wall was covered in a curtain with a gold and black motif of water.

  The geisha bot swayed gracefully as she moved. Like the décor, her appearance was meant to conjure the Japan of centuries past, but she was not meant to be mistaken for a human. Her faceplate was a painted feminine mask, glossy milk white with a perfect circle of pink that encompassed the area between her mid-forehead and lower lip. Darker pink eyebrows were painted at the top of the circle, and a small vertical rectangle of crimson marked the exact center of her mouth. Her hair was black lacquer, fanned out in the back with one section that rose up and two that framed her face. Her eyes were black and held no expression.

  The geisha bot entered the wide space of a banquet room. This, too, was in the style of old Japan. Here, another geisha bot played the strings of a quiet samisen, picking out a melancholy, traditional tune, long alabaster fingers never missing a single motion as they travelled up and down the neck of the stringed instrument. Her head turned this way and that. She and the other geisha bots in service, all identical in form, had variations in the pink patterns on their masks, but all were clad in black kimonos—except for the one in red who had just arrived.

  Human hostesses would have been completely superfluous here, as no one in the room would have cared to interact with them in any case. Bots not only suited the purpose, but the theme of the gathering; after all, the meeting in the banquet room was all about tech.

  The executives of Hanka in their expensive suits and the delegates from the West African Federation in their brightly hued robes sat cross-legged on floor mats on either side of a long, low wooden table. They laughed and conversed, eating their expensive meal with chopsticks as the synthetic servants walked among them, topping up their sake and tea bowls from cast-iron kettles.

  The red-clad geisha sat down behind Dr. Paul Osmond. He took no notice of her. Lean and gravel-voiced, Osmond was the head of Hanka’s robotics division, far too preoccupied to even look round as he held up his bowl for a refill. His dark silk jacket was a trifle too large; the stress of trying to get this deal in place had taken its toll on his sleep and appetite. Osmond kept his attention fixed on the visitors he had worked so very hard to bring here. The geisha drifted away and he took a sip of sake, savoring the bitter taste, and continued his conversation. “I’m human, I’m flawed,” Osmond confessed to the assemblage. “But I embrace change… and enhancement. Now there’s nothing I can’t do. Nothing… nothing I can’t know. Nothing I can’t be.”

  Osmond turned purposefully to the West African Federation’s president. The man’s shaved head and unlined face, framed by a neat beard, made his age difficult to judge. The president’s turquoise blue and saffron robes suggested that he was open to colorful possibilities; the dark implants at both temples proclaimed that the man was definitely in favor of cyber-enhancement; the fragrant, half-smoked cigar he gestured with in his right hand said he was a connoisseur of fine things.

  Osmond took all of these as good signs. “I want you to listen to something,” he told the president.

  Pressing a thumb-pad that shone with golden light, Osmond sent impulses through the president’s transparent cyber-enhancement lines, which lit up with a series of blue flashes as information was transmitted directly into his brain.

  The president closed his eyes to concentrate, smiling at what he heard. A little English girl sang a few bars from a classic French song. “Au clair de la lune/Mon ami Pierrot…”

  “That’s my four-year-old daughter,” Osmond explained. “In the time it took her to sing that lullaby, she learned to speak fluent French.”

  The president opened his eyes and leant forward, smiling at Osmond. Osmond felt his confidence increase. He tried to keep his mind on the business at hand, instead of thinking ahead to the promotion this contract would net him, and of the salary bump that would come with it.

  The Major heard Osmond trying to be cool and conversational through an echo box, a type of cavity resonator used to test and adjust radar equipment by bouncing a signal between the transmitter and the receiver. “Did you know that song was the earliest known recording?”

  The Major’s mental databases immediately referred her to what was being referenced—a voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune” had been made on a phonautograph, the earliest known device for recording sound, in 1860, by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. What she was hearing, however, concerned her far less than how she was hearing it. The presence of the device was unexpected, and therefore suspicious.

  “There’s an echo box,” she told Aramaki over the comms. The Major opened her kit. One end of the serpentine zeta-cable within presented six jacks that snapped smartly into sockets on the base of the echo box, and the other spooled around her wrist, almost as if it were alive. She took it between her fingers and reached up to the back of her neck, folding away her hair to access her quik-ports. The zeta-cable, made from a smart polymer configured for ultrahigh density data transfer, whispered into her dermal receiver ports and clicked home with a soft sigh.

  She stiffened slightly as her neural software made the interface with the echo box and the Maciej Hotel’s security network. Military-grade digital incursion programs made short work of the rudimentary countermeasures protecting the illegal tech.

  The president of the West African Federation apparently had the same information about the recording as the Major did. She heard him say, “Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville…”

  Computer information was being moved across a network, the Major concluded, and it wasn’t her team. “Someone’s scanning data traffic,” she reported.

  Aramaki’s command came back over the comm. “Trace where it’s transmitting.”

  The Major wanted to visually identify the conversation she overheard through the echo box. “Let’s see who’s worth this kind of surveillance.” She knew the comms would carry her words to the rest of Section Nine. She lowered her virtual reality headset and focused it on the Maciej Hotel. Within milliseconds, the Major was seeing the live feeds from the Maciej’s embedded cameras that the device had intercepted. This in turn allowed her to scan through every room in the hotel, private or public, searching for where the unit was transmitting. “Accessing hotel security network.”

  Snatches of distorted discussion—laughter, arguments, legalese, appreciations of cuisine—came through the Major’s VR headset. The VR also provided images, tracings of furniture and architectural constructions and human heat signatures. These didn’t provide tremendous detail, but the Major could see enough to know that she didn’t detect anyone doing anything that seemed like it would attract a voyeur, much less the planting of malicious spy equipment.

  As her superior, Aramaki had access to current intelligence on the hotel that the Major did not; the chief could more easily find out where any important meetings might be occurring on the premises, so that he could just tell the Major and end her room-byroom search. “What are you seeing, sir?” she asked into the comm. “I’ve got a lotta hotel to scan.”

  A hologram of the Maciej Hotel in glowing gold outline appeared on Aramaki’s desk. Registry lists scrolled beside the visual. The chief looked through them for possible locations. One immediately stood out. “There is a banquet room reserved for the President of the African Federation,” he told the Major. “Dr. Osmond is hosting for Hanka Robotics.”

  The Major adjusted her VR headset so that she could see into the banquet room. Her first impression was that it looked much like any other high-end business gathering being conducted over dinner. She caught the end of a sentence in Osmond’s English accent as he said, “…at a time.”

  “Got it,” the Major said on her comm. As she zoomed in, the visuals gained color and solidity, until she could see clear facial features and body language. She honed in on Osmond, who was identified by a holographic tag in her vision. “Forty-third floor.�
��

  She looked across the table, and saw the man her holographic readout identified as “President of West African Federation.” She thought rapidly of what all of this might mean, barely hearing the president as he articulated what he knew for Osmond’s benefit. “The early technology utilized the human body…”

  In fact, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell had used preserved parts of the ears of human cadavers in his early experiments with the phonoautograph, which made it a very early ancestor of the bio-tech that was now embodied by the Major. On another, less pressing occasion, such history might have intrigued her. Now, though, the Major sensed impending disaster. “Someone contact the president’s staff,” she said, her urgency clear over the comms. “Someone’s watching him.”

  Neither the president nor the people in the room with him were aware of this. The president was simply focused on the matters at hand. “Dr. Osmond… what is it you want from us?”

  “I think it’s more about what Hanka Robotics can do for you,” Osmond replied. That got him a few appreciative murmurs from some of the African leader’s retinue. He was winning them over. It would just take one last push to bring it home, and then he would walk out of here with the most lucrative contract his employers had seen in decades. “Seventy-three percent of this world has… woken up to the age of cyberenhancement. You really want to be left behind?”

  The president smiled, wondering if his sentiments would have any impact on the other man, whose belief in mechanization was absolute. “My people embrace cyber-enhancement, as do I.” He didn’t really need to state this; tech augmentation was clearly visible somewhere on every member of the delegation. “But there’s no one who really understands the risk… to individuality, identity… messing with the human soul.”

  Now that she had a probable target, the Major brought up everything she could reach on the security network, assembling a patchwork of images and data streams on her VR glasses. She captured the video from every camera on the forty-third level, the readouts of every fire alarm, thermostat and air quality monitor, all of it unfolding before her.